"Difficult Terrain and Our Flat Earthers" Topic

After a read of some Korean and Vietnam tactical battles, as well as a review of tactical battles in the Italian hills, the Balkans, the European forests, it is no wonder that the usual gamer wants the simplicit of the featureless steppe or desert
Yet even Russia and North Africa were not so flat
We like our flat earth because terrain rules are so bad or because they mess up point counts or because that kind of war is too rough?
Tboughts??

Takes a lot to simulate them well on the tabletop, and dedicated, sculpted, foam boards are rather expensive, and limiting.

Who wants to fight over the same terrain, over and over again?

Might work for WWI trench warfare, but not for most other battles.

About the best, happy mediums are fabric terrain, beneath or on top of which hills and other items are placed.

Sand tables sound great too, but are apparently rather messy, heavy (perhaps much less so with foam inserted beneath as fillers), and can be rather abrasive to nicely painted figures and vehicles.

It is very hard to store and transport massive hill sections. Piles of books under a cloth are a poor substitute. I think it really is as simple as that.

I'll happily cover the entire table in fields, woods, BUAs, marshes, rivers etc, but the idea of actually modelling the terrain in say, Afghanistan, gives me the heebie jeebies.

Figures fall off slopes and stepped hills never look right. Best simple alternative is to adjust fire/cover rules to simulate difficulties caused by the terrain.

I tend to think quite abstractly about such things. When you keep rolling ones, he's obviously found a dip you can't actually see represented on the table top. When you hit him next go on a six, he obviously moved a few yards out of it, or you moved a few yards (without actually moving the model) to get a better shooting position.

I tend not to get hung up on it, but then I play big battle games, usually with the smallest tactical element being a company, to avoid such trivial detail.

I think it's a mindset thing rather than an issue of modelling difficulty.

Put a hill on the table. Nobody blinks.

Suggest said hill may be more formidable than "half move". WAAAHmbulance is immediately called.

Having gamed with a billion people, I can safely say (with all the scientific rigor of anecdotal evidence) that people prefer buying ruins and houses rather than hills for their terrain collections.

Who likes a flat earth?

I agree with the above comments that logistics are challenging with elevated terrain. But they're always worth it. You really can't fight Puebla without it. Or Little Big Horn. Or …

OK, maybe these guys prefer flat terrain.

Hills are a pain- to get a realistic hight on the table it hs to be too steep to place figures on, and nobody likes deploying their figures in the formation known as "the heap".

In addition to all the above, they add a lot of "wrinkles" (no pun intended) to a game.

Hills are indeed a pain to model and game with but I have been using them more often lately – creates some tactically interesting situations

I am a big proponent of "ridge lines." They represent gentle folds in the ground too small to be modeled with "hills." I place a line of flock or scatter to represent a gentle ridge. The line blocks LOS but has no movement cost.

Another issue: our hills are often far too small. In a skirmish game really an entire table could represent just part of a hill.

Tough to model in any reasonable way.

'Ridgelines' are fine for rolling terrain (I use them myself), and I do have a fair few hills and several feet of Major General style profile mountains which are handy for breaking up the playing area.

But you aren't going to able to, model something like this with some ridgelines and a few polystyrene hills:

or this:

But you aren't going to able to, model something like this with some ridgelines and a few polystyrene hills:

That's the truth. Having recently done a convention game based on Lobositz, which has a hill (the Lobosch) not half as 'rugged' as those in your pics – it looks like this –

- the best I could come up with with was the lower slopes 5" above the valley floor at their highest, and I had a table six foot wide and 14 foot long to work with – the Lobosch is in the top left corner of the table – the highest point modelled would be the smaller of the two humps.

A challenging conundrum. we do our best with various sizes of hills on top of the ground. The best I can do for ravines are strips of felt. The lack of relief is the greatest challenge to simulations.

Representing ravines, wadis, and the like, or for representing quite small areas of low ground (where most of the table is at higher elevation is always a problem. I did another demo at a show set during Operation Crusader. Most of the battle took place at Sidi Rezegh, on top of the escarpment with wadis descending the slope to a strip of low ground that made up one edge of the table. After deciding not to fork out a heap of money on specially made tiles I came up with this:

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Trenches are also a problem

Just use ridge lines.

Not exactly flat;-

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like the man said thre are limitsa to the practical. We use Kalistra Hexon II which allows a wide variety of hills and contours but the vertical height is limited practicaly to about 2 to 3 countours each 16mm tall. The sheer volume of hex for more is too much to be practical. Very shallow slopes proably have minimal tactical impact anyway. Shove a brick under one end of the board to get a shallow slope.

Games with points systems have to restrict terrain for them to work. Dence impassble woods will not allow tanks through them, Bang goes the points system. Our rules make no pretence of a poinst system as they seldom work in real terrain.

I did a post recently where we modeled the terrain features on one side of a 10km road. Its a lot of stuff most of which is tacticaly important.

The key is proably restricting sight line. to some extent the height of the feature may not be such an issue.

Wish I'd taken a picture at the 2015 Tacticon in Aurora, CO. There is a retired teacher who puts on early WWII European and Far Eastern multi-session games using N gauge models at the Denver area cons.

Usually fairly flat, but that con his river crossing scenario from the Fall of France had him bring terrain pieces that included a foot and a half high canyon the river ran through. Trees, shrubbery and all. Not sure what he does with that between games, it filled the table.

Some years before that there was a pre-historic scenario run at Gengihiscon that had the bands traveling up a canyon modeled as 2-3 feet wide with walls over a foot and 8 feet long.

Of course those are the exceptions.

Of course what I have been thinking of is some of the terrain out here in the more arid Southwest – fairly flat areas of sagebrush broken by often abrupt ridges and random gullies that may be deeper than wide.

Always thought it would be amusing to have a meeting engagement or hasty attack where the terrain hasn't been thoroughly scouted and the typical gamer roaring along at top cross-country speed in his armor is told that he has just run into a 12 foot wide – 16 foot deep gully with near vertical walls obscured by that 4 foot high sagebrush he has been racing through.

I agree that current and past rules do point count badly. I also use ridgelines and small hills and woods as I think that the player should be able to choose micro a d larger terrain if he could know it, wbich in the case of say Waterloo creates the problem of if and wben do the Imperial Garde know about the microterrain on its final approach. To dice for unknow terrain or not? At Guadalcanal the Japanese approach march pn Henderson used faulty maps which disrupted the march, and there waz the reef at Tarawa, the approach to Montte Cassino, none of which is traditionly gameable as it means variable umpired terrain. Example, side A is told that part of the river is fordable,side B not. And those very steep hills and dense cities that block fast play, requiring heavy infantry slugging matches.

Somebody on another forum recently asked for suggestions for 'event cards'.

I suggested: terrain 'not as advertised'. Next terrain feature entered by one of the card-drawing player's units turns out to be something other than it appears. Open ground turns out to be too boggy for horses/vehicles, or crossed by a hidden fold deep enough to conceal troops. Hills turn out to be steeper than anticipated – woods turn out to be choked with undergrowth, or to be concealing other terrain features within the tree line.

Whatever, some NICE looking terrain.

I prefer crestlines over ridgelines, but that is a different discussion.

When I said ridge lines I meant crest lines.